Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Father: There's no money in those things. College was college. I
spoke tomy brother Louie, your uncle, and he agrees with
me. We want you to join the family business.
Son: The import/export business? What does literature have to
do with that?
Father: We're not technically in import and export.
Son: But.
Father: Yes, that's what the business name says, but as you put it,
there's a bit of confusion, distraction and disguise in that
text.
Son: But what about the crates of tomatoes and the endless
stream of plastic goods?
Father: Subtext. We're really moving money. We specialize in
money laundering.
Son: What does money have to do with tomatoes?
Father: Nothing and everything. We move the tomatoes, they
pay us for the tomatoes, someone sells the tomatoes, and
in the end everyone is happy. But when everything is
added up, when all of the arithmetic is done, we'vemoved
more than a million dollars for our friends. They look like
tomato kings making a huge profit off of their tomatoes.
We get to take a slice for ourselves.
Son: So it's all a front?
Father: It's classier if you think of the tomatoes as a language
filled with misdirection, misapprehension, and misun-
derstanding. We take a clear statement written in the lan-
guage of money, translate it into millions of tiny tomatoe
sentences, and then, through the magic of accounting, re-
turn it to the language of cold, hard cash.
Son: It's a new language.
Father: It's an old one. You understand addition. You understand
the sum is more than the parts. That's what we do.
Son: So what do you want fromme?
Father: You'renowanexpertonthelanguageofmisdirection.
That's exactly what we need around the office.
Son:
Ajob?
Father:
Yes. We would pay you three times whatever that publish-
ing firmwould provide you.
Son:
But I would have to forget all of the words I learned in
college. I would need to appropriate the language of the
stevedores and the longshoremen.
Father:
No. We want you to stay the way you are. All of that
literature stuff is much more confusing than any code we
Search WWH ::




Custom Search